Valve’s digital distribution platform Steam will be host its annual Dev Days event in mid-January next year and they’ve got an interesting crop of items on the menu for the developer conference. Chief among these are two presentations dealing with the company’s approach to virtual reality, one of which will feature a VR prototype that the company has developed.
A session called What VR Could, Should, and Almost Certainly Will Be within Two Years will deal with the hardware prototype developed by Valve and how to develop games for and around similar hardware before it becomes widely available, something which they expect will happen. Another session, titled Virtual Reality and Steam, will revolve around changes to the Steam platform itself in response to VR. Valve will discuss changes to the Steam store, a Steam VR overlay and their plans for Steamworks in general in the context of virtual reality.
Other sessions taking place concern themselves with Steam’s living-room hardware – including the new Steam controller – as well as developing for Linux, in-game economies, and also a session concerning itself with porting games to the Oculus Rift VR headset. The takeaway from this is that Valve appears to feel that virtual reality will be the next step in gaming.